Tag Archives: family

Sentry

2 Replies

Right now I am sitting sentry duty next to my elder daughter’s bed. Her beloved bed. You see, it is a Big Girl Bed! She even climbs a ladder to get into it. Picture an overly intense cherubic blond haired blue eyed german ploughhorse. She’s stocky and perky and deliciously incongruous. She wants people to love her so much. We shower her with love constantly. I carry her until my arms give out and then I put her in a carrier and keep going even now that she’s my big 30 lb going-on-three-year-old. Even while her baby sister is on my back. I do this because I remember that agony of need of assurance of love. I remember feeling no one in the world would ever love me enough and desperately clinging to my mother. I was so very attached to my mother. On MDC they think that is a good thing but I’m not so sure it was good for us.

I think of my beautiful child. And I think of my mother. And I think of the power she had over me. The power I have over my beloved, adored, forever wanted Shanna. I begged God for her. I named her and wanted her when I was 13 years old. To think that my mother most likely received the exact same blind absolute trust and love. My mother saw that in her child’s face and let a monster violate her. I can feel my whole body quake with hate and fear and rage. Most of the muscles in my body alternately cramp and flex. This hurts so bad. I hate her. I think if I drove to her house right now I would honk the horn until she came outside and run her over. Oh god. I’m trying to calm the panic attack closing my throat. You fucking bitch. I hate you so much. You did this to me. At the end of the day you stupid bitch. This is all on your head. I hate you. I hate you so much.

Why didn’t you love me?

And that question will never be answered. And no matter how much terror I feel. No matter the nightmare I face sitting next to her bed, my baby needs me to be happy. My baby needs me to take in her love and return it to her as joy. It is so hard to appreciate her like she deserves. I wish that my sweet girl didn’t have to show me her remarkable empathy so often. I wish my baby didn’t offer me hugs and kisses to feel better.

And every time one more person tells me more reasons that who I am or what I am doing is bad or wrong it just makes it one little bit harder. Like what I am doing is not hard enough.

About my niece…

2 Replies

I had her come over for a bit yesterday to chat. There were some shudder inducing moments for me. She didn’t even know how she did in the classes because she never bothered to check. REALLY?! She had to ask me to define words a few times (the most memorable being dilettante). And she expressed extreme surprise that you don’t need a Business degree in order to open a small business doing event planning. *smack forehead* Essentially I talked her out of college for now. She’s really not ready. I told her that after some time has passed and she is actually interested in buckling down and doing the work she can try again but I’m not paying for her to fuck around. She seems oddly relieved.

It was overall a positive conversation. She really needs some life experience before she will see any value in college. I’m the only adult in her life with a college degree, of course she doesn’t really see much value in school. (Although I was smart enough to be in the position where I had *no* adults in my life who had been to college and recognize it as the problem…) So she’s going to go do her thing. I’m… I’m hoping that she does something with her life that is better than what my sister has done but I’m not holding my breath at this juncture. It could go either way. (Yes, I get to judge the fuck out of my sister.)

Families kinda suck. How hard is it going to be to ensure my kids don’t end up like my family?

On yet other family stuff

3 Replies

Noah’s mother has sent me some of the very best kids clothes we own. Really awesome stuff. I’ve been thrilled. This time… she sent jeggings. For those of you lucky enough to avoid this phenomenon: http://styletips101.com/fashion/how-to-wear-jeggings.html

I hope we ditch this ‘fashionable’ trend. I’m so not fashionable. 🙂 More smocked little girl dresses! (Uhm, in all reality I’ll randomly babble about this on lj but I certainly won’t complain because I am overall really surprised by how pleasantly things are going with Noah’s parents. This is me not rocking the boat!)

But really. Jeggings?

Paying for college

23 Replies

This is f-locked in case someone in my family is paying attention. I doubt it, but there is a slight possibility. So we are paying for my niece to go to college. This is something that I have always said I was happy to do for my niece and nephew to help them get the fuck out of the shitty life our family has. My nephew wanted to do this intensive program on learning how to install solar panels… sure! I’ll pay for that! That would be a great career! After doing alright in the program he decided he didn’t want to do it as a career. His skin is too sensitive to be outside that much. . . . Maybe you could have thought about this a bit earlier sensitive boy? (Oh, he works at Shoreline every summer as a parking attendant because it is ‘cool’. At least he has done it for two years in a row. So much for the sensitive skin.)

Now my niece is taking classes at the local JC. Though she wants to transfer because the one she is going to has “too many Asians”. I’m not entirely sure what that means as a criticism, but ok. She gave me her login information to the webportal program the school uses so I can pay her fees. She thinks I am not able to check her grades. I’m not sure why she is stupid enough to think that, but ok. Last term she withdrew from the PE class she insisted that she wanted to take (I told her it was a bad idea) and she got a C in the Intro to Business class (she wants to be a Business major) and a D in the basic level accounting class. So her GPA is a 1.5. No one is perfect, I get that. But uhm… a free ride to college is not exactly a god given right.

Right now I’m feeling pretty fussy. If I sit her down and explain, “These D’s won’t even transfer. So I’m paying for you to *say* you are in college but this isn’t actually making any progress towards your supposed future goals.” I will be the bitch. I will be the bad person who is pressuring her. In paying for her college we are directly taking money we would be investing on Shanna and Calli’s education and using it on my niece instead. I’m not sure how willing I am to do that while my niece is much more interested in partying than in going to school. But if I cut her off I am probably cutting off my last real tie to my family. I will have proven that I am a terrible person.

I love how no matter what *I* am the bad guy.

EDIT: Noah points out that this post doesn’t convey a lot of why I am pissy. She posts constantly on facebook about partying. She will only take night classes because she is completely unwilling to get up at a reasonable hour (I mean getting up before noon, not 6 am). I would have more sympathy if I thought she was trying and just not getting it right. She skips classes to go to parties. Yeah… it’s not just that she is trying and not figuring things out.

Edited again:
I just went and looked. She hasn’t bothered to submit any financial aid paperwork whatsoever. Given that her mother hasn’t worked in the past couple of years (I’m not sure how Denise is going to increase her drug dealing enough to stay afloat once she stops getting unemployment) I bet that I shouldn’t have to pay almost anything at all for my niece’s education. But she can’t be bothered. Oh I’m getting pissier by the minute.

Pictures

7 Replies

Here a couple so people can stop bugging me! 😀 Oh, and I also don’t particularly want to put them on facebook because then my niece will show them to my mom and sister and I’m currently feeling twitchy about that. Erf.

Ze baby:

Semi recent… like two weeks ago

About a month ago

On my birthday, so when Calli was ~2 weeks old. Shanna is a bit over 2 years. 🙂

Anniversary

8 Replies

Today my father has been dead for 12 years. He committed suicide to avoid going to prison for molesting me. It sounds so… dramatic. I wish I could stop having mixed feelings about it. I wish I could just get over it or hate him or feel at peace. I’m sad that I never really got to have a father. I’m sad that he made the choices he made. I’m sad that so many people were hurt because of him.

I’m not sad I broke the cycle.

Mmmm nervous energy

12 Replies

Otherwise known as: what I’m doing with all this anxiety. Cause I’m still feeling a lot of anxiety. Thankfully I’m capable of using it in ways that will make me happier long term.

I have been working on cleaning up the garage and paring things down a little more and a little more and a little more. The shed in the back yard has been awesomely handy for most of the time I’ve lived here, but at this point there are almost as many leaks in the roof as there is roof. Given that it is a cheap metal shed ‘fixing’ it would mean just tacking a tarp over it and my freak out about getting away from my white trash roots mean that I just can’t live with that as a solution. Last year with all the lovely rain we developed a rather unpleasant mold problem and a bunch of stuff had to be trashed. Thus my goal right now is to go through stuff in the garage and shed and get to the point where all of our stuff fits comfortably in the corner of the garage so Shanna can still have a playroom and we can get rid of the shed. I’m not sure how that will long-term affect what I do with the back yard but I can’t help but think it’ll be a good thing to not have random crap living out there that we never touch. 🙂 I’m working pretty seriously towards this ‘minimalist’ lifestyle thing and it’s making me happy. I am pretty convinced that we will not be able to move out of this house any decade soon and that means we will need to fit in this space comfortably as our kids grow up. This means making room for their stuff. So I’m getting a head start on that process so it’s not a tug-of-war power struggle over who has to get rid of stuff later. 🙂 Not to mention that the less shit we have the less cleaning we have to do!

So Shanna’s toys are consolidating. The pantry is consolidating. I’m trying to figure out the happy medium between getting rid of too much stuff that we will actually miss and getting down to just the stuff that improves our life.

I’m having a quandary about something though. (Hint: this is one of the rare times I’m open to advice!) I have a gorgeous crystal punch bowl shaped like a huge brandy glass with accompanying tiny punch glasses. This is like 40ish years old at this point so it is very fragile. I think I would be afraid to actually use it because it is a family sentimental piece. It was my moms–one of the few things she managed to hang on to through all the years of her hellish moving. Despite my overall lack of sentimentality I would absolutely never just ‘get rid of’ this. I won’t sell it to strangers and I won’t donate it. But I feel like giving it back to my mother is… awkward. If I leave it at my Aunt’s house for my mom to pick up I feel like I will be opening the door for her to do the same thing to me and I don’t want that to happen. If I ask my niece if she wants it (to ‘keep it in the family) it would be a passive aggressive way of getting it back to my mom because my niece will ask my mom about it, not to mention that they are living together. I would kind of like to just give it back to my mom. This is an important thing to her and I have enough respect for her sentimental attachment to it that I can’t get rid of it… but it doesn’t really mean as much to me. Any ideas on how to resolve this situation?

Oh the drama.

Leave a reply

So I talked to my aunt tonight. The very very very short version of the latest shit from my family:

-my uncle got turned into the county for his property being such a dump. They have to clean shit up. No one is helping my 70-something year old aunt and her two disabled 50-something year old sons do this clean up (oh, one of them is a paraplegic). None of the people my aunt has supported over the years including my mother and my sister…

-my mother and my sister apparently went and got a house together with my sister’s two kids. The kids are the only ones working. Neither my mother nor sister have jobs. I don’t know how they are paying the rent. I suspect my mother is living off the proceeds of selling her trailer (bad long-term plan there) and I suspect my sister is dealing. Oh, and my sister dumped the boyfriend who was supporting her. He didn’t want to continue supporting my sister’s menagerie of stray ‘kids’. My mom made her kick them all out though. Excellent timing there.

-my cousin had a daughter about two months ago. The baby has cystic fibrosis. 🙁 All of her medical care is currently being paid for by some sort of charitable program Stanford has because my cousin and his girlfriend have no money.

And my brother pinged me on facebook today. He wanted to talk about grieving our brother. He said he has many days where he is still nearly non-functional due to grief. Our brother killed himself more than 12 years ago. My surviving brother seriously needs some counseling but he won’t go.

I feel more and more sane and functional all the time!

I’m going to sit over here and judge

1 Reply

(See–I never said I would stop judging. I said I would work on not shaming. DIFFERENT)

My niece just posted on facebook about the $6,000 car she just bought. Well, I guess that means she won’t be moving out at the end of the summer. *sigh* If she doesn’t get the #$@# out of my sister’s house soon I sincerely doubt she will ever do anything with her life. If you spend all your time with drug addicts who STEAL MONEY AND FOOD FROM YOU then you really aren’t likely to ever have much. She has admitted just how difficult it is to study in that house because there are always people over partying till all hours of the night. I offered to give her the down payment on an apartment if she saved up enough money to have two months of living expenses in the bank so that she could get-the-fuck out. I have also offered to pay for her college education. I see the chances of that actually happening going down the drain rapidly. I feel very sad. 🙁

I don’t think you have to ‘turn out like me’ to have a good life. Far from it. I think that you need to not spend all your time around loser drug addicts who steal from you and destroy your belongings and future in order to have a good life.

Well, fuck.

9 Replies

Thanks to facebook I now know that my mother is moving back to San Jose this week with help from my niece.

shit.shit.shit.shit.shit.

Anyone want to make a bet on how long before she starts contacting me to pressure me into letting her see the kids because they ‘deserve’ a relationship with her?

A good day

1 Reply

I spend most of my time on lj posting about being unhappy or talking about Shanna. That is totally not representative of my every day so uhm, here’s a post that is less depressing.

Today is a good day. I got a little bit of yard work done out front. It’s been bugging me so I’m glad I’ve gotten around to it. I scheduled house cleaning stuff for the next several months so that I can stop feeling bad about how little cleaning I do. (Noah [whom I do not spend nearly enough time talking up–he’s so fabulous] does most of the ‘picking up’ so our house isn’t too bad, but he doesn’t really like doing the deeper cleaning.) Currently it sucks for me to bend over and do it so we decided that three or four months of someone else cleaning our house was a Good Idea. The vast majority of this additional spending right now is coming out of the much larger than anticipated tax refund, so I am thanking my lucky stars that we got it. I really and truly see the financial privilege I have these days and I feel so grateful that I have it. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure can do a lot of work towards making life easier so that you have less stress. That leads to increased happiness. So I thank anyone upstairs who is listening that my life is so easy at this point.

For all that I’m not a great pregnant person I am deeply grateful that this pregnancy is easier than Shanna’s. I’m super tired. I have a lot of random body discomfort. I’m cranky. But I haven’t puked once! I am not so completely listless that I am not functioning! I do manage to take Shanna out to play at least once a week and I’m arranging for her to have more opportunities than that with other people. I’m cranky with her, but she’s spectacular about telling me, “It’s not nice to yell at me.” Which really puts a fast halt to my temper tantrums. Having a two year old call me on my behavior is incredibly humbling in a good for me way. I really love having her.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the sexual assault stuff and I am feeling… better isn’t quite the word but less disturbed. I’m feeling more like I really have handled things in a way that is ultimately good for me. Of course I have done things poorly at times. Of course I have not always been in the best place right that minute. But overall I don’t feel like I am a terrible non-functioning crazy person. And sometimes good enough is good enough. 🙂

Mostly I had a really good weekend. I really love my family. I have a wonderful, supportive, amazing husband. I feel like I had the most perfect-for-me little girl possible. I like her so much. I’m rather excited about meeting kid 2.0. If Noah and I combined to make one kid this awesome, what will 2.0 be like? I strongly suspect that next kid will be very very different from Shanna. I base this on the differences in the pregnancy. This kid is active in a way that Shanna wasn’t. This makes me slightly nervous because of the potential differences in sleeping habits. Shanna has been an awesome sleeper since birth. But we’ll roll with it. Whatever happens is what is meant to happen. I think that I am nervous about having expectations this time. Before Shanna I had almost zero exposure to babies. I had no idea what to expect and then she was so easy. (Maybe my memory is already getting fuzzy… who knows.) Now I’ve had a kid so I have a bit more of the ‘I know about kids’ attitude. I’d be better off assuming that I know nothing again. 🙂

So, yeah. Life is plugging along. I have 6ish weeks to go. I’m nervous but looking forward to the birth. It will be a rather different experience this time. Shanna has expressed rather strongly that she wants to be at the birth so that’s going to be interesting. Luckily nipple stimulation is a big help because there is no way I will be able to keep her from nursing during labor. 😀 I’m really looking forward to tandem nursing for some weird, masochistic reason. Something about it just seems really… I don’t know… motherly? Like even if I feel like psychologically I am not always the best at mothering my body is doing GREAT at the physical parts! I can’t quite figure out why I am looking forward to it so much. Too many years on MDC. They have infected my brain. 😀

So yeah. It’s a good day after having a couple of other good days in a row. 🙂

As awesome as I anticipated.

12 Replies

My sister ran up and kissed me on the cheek and said, “I at least still love you.” (Cause of course I don’t love her.)
My mother thanked me for coming in a pretty sucktastic tone of voice. (I let my mother down so why wouldn’t I let my niece down?)
My uncle told me that I should come to his house at least once a week because ‘the women work more when you show up’. (I totally want to harass the women in my family to do more work for the lazy piece of shit.)
My niece’s father repeatedly groped my belly and kept making really strong sexual innuendo about how pregnant chicks are hot; this was overt enough to make Noah uncomfortable. (This guy tried to fuck me when I was eleven.)
My cousins didn’t really speak to me. (They are pissed that I offered to host Christmas so my 70 something year old aunt didn’t have to do all the work.)

Luckily I got to see two awesome women who show me what family actually is earlier in the day. I’m really grateful that I have such an amazing chosen family.

Random weekending

Leave a reply

I love getting to spend three days in a row with Noah. <3 Mostly we puttered and got house chores done but we had a few breaks for fun. Two things in particular: we took Shanna to Build a Bear because she has often expressed that she wants a bear that is -just hers-. All of her stuffed animals are hand me downs and I think she is tired of hearing that 'x' thing was Mommy's or Aunt Jenny's or Daddy's or... :D So she picked a blue bear and named him Blue. Alrighty then. :) And she did animal role play for the first time. I thought that was pretty cool and noteworthy. She picked a duck, specifically the anthropomorphic Elmer from The Sissy Duckling which has been one of her favorite longer books since she was too small to sit through a long book. 🙂

Pregnancy is all festive and such. I feel ginormous. As I see pictures of other people who are at about the same stage of pregnancy as me I feel confirmed in feeling ginormous. Why am I so much bigger than average?! Oy. Still not gaining weight. I’m currently reading Bradley’s, Husband-Coached Childbirth and it has some good pointers once you wade through all the obnoxious Christian references.

Today is going to be way too busy. I’m tired already. There will be over 100 miles of driving today. Ugh. But I’ll get to see my niece graduate from high school. That will be a good thing. I’m really glad she made it.

the drama

1 Reply

My sister called and I rolled it to voicemail. I really don’t want to have a conversation with her before my niece’s graduation because she will make the whole day hell.

She wants to know what is going on because I am ignoring her. She also wants to know why I blocked her on facebook and what is going on with my pregnancy.

I…

This sucks. 🙁

Again.

6 Replies

My sister seems to have given out my phone number … again. I got them to stop calling for a long time and now the creditors are calling like crazy again. I’m really angry. Given that I had already reached the conclusion that having anything to do with her is unhealthy I feel like this is just an extra slap in the face to remind me of why I don’t want to have her in my life. She is not capable of having her bad decisions affect only her. I realize that people end up having bill collectors calling for all kinds of good reasons and that not everyone in debt is a shitty person. My sister hasn’t felt like working in over a year so she hasn’t. She truly is getting harassed because she makes shit-tastic decisions and I’m fucking sick of them becoming my problem.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH

Follow up

3 Replies

It went well. Auntie made an effort to understand why I feel the way I feel and that’s a big deal. Her comments started out with, “I can’t see how occasional contact would possibly be a problem” and ended with, “Ok I can understand how lying like that is a problem.” That’s kind of a little tiny bit HUGE!! Dude. Strangely enough it is the constant lying (by my mom and sister) that she can really wrap her head around rather than the abuse. It was interesting to try to explain cycles of abuse to her. Once I was done I think she understood. At the very least she said she was willing to support me when I finished saying, “I don’t think they are bad people. I don’t think they engage in this behavior for malicious reasons. I think they were both abused so much for so long that they don’t understand how fucked up this behavior is and they are unwilling to admit they are abusers so they can never change.” She was very sad. I told her I am sad too. But I have to do this for my daughter. When I made the decision to have children I did it in full knowledge that I had to protect my children and ensure that they have a better than average shot at ending up happy, healthy people and that requires that I put up very strict boundaries around situations that will hurt them. She tried to say, “But if Shanna only sees them occasionally it won’t be as bad as it was for you.” I repeated what she said. I asked her how she feels about the fact that she can say, “as bad as it was for you” about my childhood. I asked her if she really feels Shanna deserves to be exposed to *any* bad.

It went very very well.

Feeling nervous.

3 Replies

Today I am going to go see my auntie. I’m going to try to explain to her why I am going no contact with my sister and my mother again. I would like to maintain a relationship with her though, and that will require that she understand why I don’t want information about me passed on. It’s going to be very difficult for me to explain to her things about the cycle of abuse. She is not the most self-examining person in the world and she’s in her 70’s. Not usually a time of rapidly expanding ones horizons. I really love her though and I think she is a healthy, good person. She’s just… very much an enabler. She doesn’t want to get in the middle of things.

I’m nervous about this. I’m not sure she can understand and in my “I desperately want approval” sort of way if she just completely doesn’t get it I will feel invalidated. I shouldn’t need her understanding. I really shouldn’t. But I feel like I do anyhow. I’m somewhat tempted to bring the checklist of abusive behaviors. It wouldn’t help at all, so I won’t, but I feel so tempted.

I feel like I am fighting a current of whitewater rapids in standing up for myself. I desperately wish that my family was capable of acting like decent people.

Things I’ll never say

11 Replies

Dear Sissy,

You are persistently asking, nay demanding, that I give you information about my pregnancy and Shanna’s current progress. You state that I haven’t wanted to share, but you can’t wait any longer for the information. I’m not sure why it is that you believe you “can’t wait any longer” but you are going to wait quite a bit longer, potentially into forever. I’ll explain why.

In the past year you have made it very clear that if I want to have a relationship it involves “forgiving you” of anything you do at any point. You stated to our brother that “that’s how love works.” No, that is how abusive relationships work. I do not have any obligation whatsoever to forgive people constantly of repetitive hurtful behavior. In fact, it would be strongly to my detriment to do so. I would be showing my daughter that I believe I deserve the treatment you give me by continuing to engage with it and I am absolutely unwilling to present such a view to my daughter.

You came to my house, where you were my guest and I had gone through a great deal of effort on behalf of you and your family, and proceeded to lecture me about how you have to assume all of the matriarchal duties because “No one else is going to do it.” Essentially you were letting me know that regardless of what you actually -do- you are my superior. I reject this version of reality on every level. You will never be the matriarch of any group I am part of. The reason for this is very simple: I have no respect for you. If you nominate yourself the matriarch of our family I will leave. I would prefer having no family over having to tolerate the abuse you consider standard in familial relations.

I will never send you this letter because just like every other text book abuser you would find a way to feel victimized and declare that I need to apologize for being so terrible to you. I am not terrible for pointing out the specifics of your inappropriate behavior I am being honest. I am taking responsibility for my own mental health and well being. I am accepting the overwhelming responsibility of modeling healthy, appropriate relationships for my daughter. I am no longer engaged in the cycle of abuse and I refuse to step back into it.

Sincerely,
Your Adult Sister